News tagged with magma

While big game animals such as lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and water buffaloes draw most visitors to Pilanesberg National Park, the land these animals live on is just as compelling. Pilanesberg is located in one of ...

Super-eruptions are not the only type of eruption to be considered when evaluating hazards at volcanoes with protracted eruption histories, such as the Yellowstone (Wyoming), Long Valley (California), and Valles (New Mexico) ...

Hawaii is famous for its lovely mountains, tropical climate, and majestic oceanfront vistas. Another thing it is famous for is the string of volcanoes that dot its islands. As a land that sits atop a geographic hot spot – ...

Axial Seamount, an active underwater volcano located about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon and Washington, appears to be erupting – after two scientists had forecast that such an event would take place there in 2015.

University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock 12 to 28 miles beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber.

The "seismic crisis" around the region of the Chiles and Cerro Negro de Mayasquer volcanoes near the Columbia-Ecuador border is likely caused by intruding magma, according to a report by R. Corredor Torres of the Servicio ...

To understand when and why volcanoes erupt, scientists study the rocks left behind by eruptions past. A method called geobarometry uses the composition of volcanic rocks to estimate the pressure and depth at which molten ...

It was a bit like making a CT scan of a patient's head and finding he had very little brain or making a PET scan of a dead fish and seeing hot spots of oxygen consumption. Scientists making seismic images of the mantle beneath ...

Magma

Magma is molten rock that is found beneath the surface of the Earth, and may also exist on other terrestrial planets. Besides molten rock, magma may also contain suspended crystals and gas bubbles. Magma often collects in a magma chamber inside a volcano. Magma is capable of intrusion into adjacent rocks, extrusion onto the surface as lava, and explosive ejection as tephra to form pyroclastic rock.

Magma is a complex high-temperature fluid substance. Temperatures of most magmas are in the range 700°C to 1300°C (or 1292°F to 2372°F), but very rare carbonatite melts may be as cool as 600°C, and komatiite melts may have been as hot as 1600°C. Most are silicate solutions.

Environments of magma formation and compositions are commonly correlated. Environments include subduction zones, continental rift zones, mid-oceanic ridges, and hotspots, some of which are interpreted as mantle plumes. Despite being found in such widespread locales, the bulk of the Earth's crust and mantle is not molten. Rather, most of the Earth takes the form of a rheid, a form of solid that can move or deform under pressure. Magma, as liquid, preferentially forms in high temperature, low pressure environments within several kilometers of the Earth's surface.

Magma compositions may evolve after formation by fractional crystallization, contamination, and magma mixing. By definition, all igneous rock is formed from magma.

While the study of magma has historically relied on observing magma in the form of lava outflows, magma was discovered in situ for the first time in 2008.